Andrew McCoy

Service and Maintenance Contributor

Andrew McCoy is the Preston and Catharine White Fellow and Department Head of the Department of Building Construction in the Myers-Lawson School of Construction at Virginia Tech. Contact him at apmccoy@vt.edu.

More Articles by Andrew McCoy

On the bitterly cold and windy afternoon of Dec. 24, 1945, a Liberty ship packed with hundreds of troops returning from the war in Europe cut through frigid water and swirling snow as it passed the Statue of Liberty. Everyone...

“This place looks like a dump!” bellowed Larry, a service electrician, as he opened the door to his customer’s electrical equipment room. He should have closed the door behind him before blurting out his assessment of the...

We don’t “build” buildings anymore. We assemble them. Most of what we have always categorized as “material” now more accurately deserves to be called “products.” Consequently, today in new construction or service work, the...

Every electrical contractor will tell you their business is relationship-based. They owe their success to strong customer relationships. We agree. We also think most ECs could get much more out these relationships. We tested...

Electrical contractors today slap their corporate taglines next to the name of their company in just about every place imaginable—on their fleet vehicles, their office building, their stationery, their business forms, their...

Jerry McGlynn knew he had to catch up. He had been hired to take charge of his company’s safety program and needed a whole new set of certifications to fill that role. So, he set out to acquire them. Today, his business card...

Construction activity in many regional markets has heated up to the point that some areas are experiencing worker shortages. In the midst of such a boom, it is easy to forget that, for every boom, there is a bust. That...

Smarter materials management is especially beneficial in electrical service work. Service electricians are constantly confronted with the challenge of obtaining materials while striving to minimize the amount of lost time,...

Electrical contractors convey electrical products on the last mile of the journey from manufacturer through distributor to installation. This applies to products for every type of electrical work. In a paradigm shift, if ECs...

Electrical contractors who have built a successful business in commercial or industrial construction are quick to offer very standard explanations as to why they never pursue residential service work. Forget their answers....

Rachel Hienz would have never expected the situation that was about to unfold as she entered a bank branch one morning. She was there for a pre-job walk-through with other representatives of companies that would soon begin...

Organizations, particularly contracting businesses, tend to fade from history rather quickly. So, whenever we encounter a great old company such as Harrington Electric Co. in Cleveland, which is about to celebrate its 110th...